The second Karabakh. Why did it start and how did it end

ROssia once again receives the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan. Her resolute mediation a year ago made it possible to stop the second Karabakh war. Why it started and how it developed – in the material of RBC

The second Karabakh. Why it started and how it ended

A year has passed since the end of the second Karabakh war, but many contradictions have remained unresolved. Because of this, armed clashes regularly break out on the border of Armenia and Azerbaijan. On November 16, one of the shootings escalated into full-fledged fighting with the use of armored vehicles and artillery, killing more than ten people on both sides.

Last year’s conflict, which began on September 27 and lasted 44 days, became one of the bloodiest in the post-Soviet space – according to various sources, from 6 thousand to 10 thousand people were killed. At the same time, many provisions of the trilateral statement signed on the night of November 10 by the leaders of Russia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, which put an end to the war, have not yet been implemented. The mandate of the Russian military in the region has not been clarified, Armenia and Azerbaijan have not concluded a full-fledged peace agreement.

How the war was stopped

One of the main intrigues left after the war is why the Azerbaijani army stopped and did not conquer the entire Armenian part of Nagorno-Karabakh. No later than November 7, she established control over the city of Shusha (Shushi in the Armenian version)— a strategic height dominating Stepanakert. At that time, only a couple hundred people remained in the capital of the unrecognized Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (NKR) (including several members of the government and employees of the presidential office), civilians had already been evacuated.The leadership of the NKR left for the north to the village of Vank. On November 9, those who remained in the city were given automatic rifles and several magazines of ammunition for each, an interlocutor in the NKR government, who remained in Stepanakert until the last day of the war, told RBC. He is sure that in a day or two after the capture of Shusha, the Azerbaijani army could be in the capital of the NKR. “If I were in the place of [Ilham] Aliyev, I would take the whole of Karabakh,” says a former Armenian official, a participant in the first Karabakh war. But Azerbaijan did not go further than Shushi.

Two RBC interlocutors familiar with the content of the negotiations, It is claimed that this happened due to the fact that Moscow has tightened its rhetoric in negotiations with Baku. On one of the last days of the war, Russian President Vladimir Putin had a “tough” conversation with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, the interlocutors of RBC say. An Armenian diplomat who participated in negotiations with Russia during the war also heard that Russia made an offer to Azerbaijan, which he could not refuse. The press secretary of the Russian president Dmitry Peskov, when asked by RBC whether Putin threatened Aliyev with force, replied: “No. This is complete stupidity.”

At the same time, a few hours before the announcement of the truce, under circumstances that were not fully explained, the Azerbaijanis shot down a Russian Mi-24 helicopter on Armenian territory near the border with Nakhichevan, killing two pilots. According to official information, the helicopter accompanied the convoy of the 102nd military base, which was moving in the direction of Nagorno-Karabakh. President Aliyev apologized for this, promised to punish the perpetrators, but the results of the investigation were not announced.

According to an Azerbaijani diplomatic source, the war ended with the capture of Shusha, because Baku fulfilled its tasks and occupied this strategic height over Stepanakert, and according to the agreements, Baku received three districts in addition to those that were captured during the fighting.

Moscow also conducted an active information campaign. Russian officials, including the head of foreign intelligence, Sergei Naryshkin, claimed last October that militants-mercenaries from terrorist organizations, including those from Jabhat al-Nusra, banned in Russia, were gathering in Karabakh. “However, we cannot but be concerned that TranscaucasiaIt can become a new springboard for international terrorist organizations, from where militants can subsequently infiltrate states adjacent to Azerbaijan and Armenia, including Russia,” Naryshkin said on October 6. In addition, according to him, “for the first time, Turkey has spoken so openly and unequivocally on the side of Azerbaijan.”

The first draft of the final document that ended the war appeared just on November 7, the day of the fall of Shusha, according to the interlocutors of RBC. On the night of November 9-10, the terms of the truce were announced— the leaders of Russia, Armenia and Azerbaijan simultaneously signed it online. Armenia has lost all seven districts of the “security belt”, as well as Hadrut and Shushi, cities of the former NKAO, and a number of villages. The parties agreed to deploy almost two thousand peacekeepers along the new linecontact for a period of five years. In the next few days, equipment and Russian peacekeepers arrived at the Erebuni airfield. The parties tried to agree on their mandate, but any discussion of it rested on the issue of the status of Nagorno-Karabakh. Baku insists on recognizing territorial integrity and wants to discuss the parameters of the peacekeeping mission only with Moscow, without Armenia’s participation, a Russian diplomatic source says.

What preceded the war

The Tavush clashes were preceded by a fairly active negotiation process in 2019 and 2020. The parties discussed concrete proposals for a peaceful settlement “on paper”. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov also spoke about this in April 2020. In May, the sides were preparing to start discussing each other’s ideas in detail, an Armenian diplomatic source claims. One of the recent proposals of Yerevan, for example, was the rejection of the old division”security belts” for seven districts were proposed instead to draw a new border of the NKR according to the coordinates. Such that it would be convenient for Armenians to defend it in case of escalation. This approach compensated Armenia for Azerbaijan’s unwillingness to immediately recognize the independence of the NKR. «Security in return for status»,— characterizes the approach of the interlocutor of RBC. However, due to the pandemic, all negotiations were put on pause.

Conflict history

The active confrontation over Nagorno-Karabakh has been going on between Yerevan and Baku for almost 30 years. This region, whose population is predominantly Armenians, declared independence from Azerbaijan in 1991. In 1992–1994, immediately after the collapse of the USSR, there was a war for him, in which the Armenians eventually won. In addition to the territory of the former Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Region, Armenian formations also captured several districts of Azerbaijan: completely Kelbajar and Lachin, Kubatli, Jabrayil and Zangelan, and partially Aghdam and Fizuli.

How the war started

The day and time of the start of the second Karabakh war came as a surprise to Yerevan, according to the interlocutor of RBC in the Armenian government. This was confirmed by RBC and an interlocutor in the government of the unrecognized republic. According to him, the troops were put on full combat readiness a day or two before the first shots were fired.An army unit within the Republican army and subordinates to it, the interlocutors in Yerevan and Stepanakert confirmed to RBC. There is military service in Armenia, and many conscripts served in the ranks of the Defense Army before the war (although de jure the NKR and its institutions are independent of Armenia). Now this practice has stopped, the interlocutors of RBC say.

In Moscow, at least at the diplomatic level, at first they did not perceive the conflict that had begun as capable of changing the status quo in the region, a Russian diplomatic source tells RBC. According to Baku, the Armenians attacked first and Azerbaijan launched an offensive in response. A year later, there was no evidence that Armenia or the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic started the war. Yerevan believes that this was a planned offensive operation from the very beginning.

At the end of September, thousands of women, old people and children left Nagorno-Karabakh. The exit from the unrecognized republic for Karabakh men capable of holding weapons was closed. From the frontline towns and villages of Martuni, Hadrut and others, the mass flight took place in a hurry, people took only the most necessary things, even left pets, because they thought that the conflict would last no longer than a few days, as it was in April 2016. On departure froman unrecognized republic has formed a multi-kilometer traffic jam. Stepanakert, which had been hit by Azerbaijani artillery since the first days, was also quickly emptied. A few days after the start of the war, there were mostly only military men on the streets of the NKR capital, the rare civilians who remained in the city spent the night in bomb shelters. Before the war, more than 150 thousand Armenians lived in the region, now, according to peacekeepers, only 53 thousand have returned, a Russian diplomatic source told RBC.

How were the battles going

Azerbaijan was advancing in two main directions: in the northeast to Martakert, in the south to Fuzuli and Jabrail. Several Armenian rank-and-file and junior officers who held the defense in the north, in a conversation with RBC, expressed the opinion that this was an auxiliary direction, there were no such fierce battles as in the south, but Azerbaijan was constantly creatingtension to prevent the transfer of Armenian forces to the south, where the main blow fell. The main targets of the Azerbaijani artillery and aviation in the first days of the war were air defense systems. After the war, the Secretary of the NKR Security Council Samvel Babayan stated that in the first minutes of the conflict, the army lost about half of all air defense equipment.

For the first two weeks, the Armenian army quite confidently restrained the offensive of the Azerbaijani army. The fiercest fighting at that time took place in the south, in the Jabrayil direction – the flat part of Nagorno-Karabakh and the only place where it was possible to use heavy military equipment, in particular tanks. It was from the breakthrough that the front of the Nagorno-Karabakh Defense Army fell here.

On October 4, Ilham Aliyev announced the capture of Jabrayil. This was the first major success of the Azerbaijani army in the south. On October 15, the Azerbaijani army occupied Hadrut, the first Armenian city of the former NKAO, and two days later – Fuzuli. From that moment on, the situation at the front became catastrophic for the Armenians. After the fall of Hadrut, there were signs of panic in the Armenian leadership, it became clear that assessments of the situation and forecasts strongly diverge from reality, recalls the interlocutor of RBC, who worked in the government of the country at that time. On October 22, Aliyev announced the establishment of control over the entire border of the NKR and Iran along the Araks River. Cannonade was heard in Goris, the first major city of Armenia on the way out of Karabakh.

How the parties tried to reach an agreement

All the time of the conflict, there were active negotiations on the cessation of hostilities. The first chance to stop the war appeared on October 7. On this day, Putin had telephone conversations with Pashinyan and Aliyev. Two days later, on October 9, the Foreign Ministers of Armenia and Azerbaijan arrived in Moscow, Russia acted as an intermediary. Negotiations began at 4 p.m. and lasted 11 hours. As a result, the parties managed to agree on a truce. An additional condition was the deployment in the regionobservers of several dozen people from each side along the line of contact – at that time, the Armenian forces left only Jabrayil, an Armenian diplomat who participated in the negotiations told RBC. However, the truce announced on October 10 was disrupted in the first hours. Twice more, the parties announced a ceasefire on October 17 and 25, already with the mediation of France and the United States (the OSCE Minsk Group co-chair countries), but each time everything broke down in the first hours.

A week after the end of the war, Vladimir Putin said that the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh could have ended in October, but the Armenian side refused to accept a ceasefire offer that was beneficial to it. On October 19–20, the Russian president had a series of telephone conversations with Aliyev and Pashinyan. And, according to Putin, he managed to convince Aliyev that it is possible to stop the fighting. In return for the transfer of five districts of the “security belt” Baku agreed to stop the offensive and deploy Russian peacekeepers along the linecontacts, according to a source familiar with the content of the negotiations. An additional condition was the return of Azerbaijani refugees to Shusha, who lived in the city before the outbreak of the first Karabakh war (until 1992, Azerbaijanis made up about 90% of the city’s population). However, Pashinyan eventually refused the offer. Putin said that it was “unexpected” for him that Yerevan refused the offer to end the war on these terms, because “then the Azerbaijani armed forces regained control over a minor part, the southern part of Karabakh.”

This proposal differed from the final agreement in that Armenia retained two of the seven districts of the “security belt”, Kelbajar and Lachin, plus Shusha with Azerbaijani refugees in it , claims the interlocutor of RBC. And now there was a “completely different situation” from the point of view of security, he says. A border conflict like the one that occurred in mid-November of this year did not happen, since such a section of the interstate border did not arise, he adds.

The Armenian side questions this interpretation of the negotiations. According to the interlocutor of RBC in Yerevan, no unequivocal agreement was received from Baku on these conditions. However, he makes a reservation, if such consent was given, it was only in a personal conversation between the leaders of the countries, and this may explain why he is not aware of it.

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Источник rbc.ru

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